Thomas Davis, Selections from His Prose and Poetry

Thomas Osborne Davis died at thirty, yet in a handful of working years he shaped the tone of Irish nationalism for a generation. Edited posthumously by T. W. Rolleston, this volume gathers his prose and verse in one place: historical essays, among them a spirited defense of the much-maligned Irish Parliament of James II, political and literary articles written for The Nation, and a body of ballads that Irish readers once learned by heart. The poems include “A Nation Once Again,” “The Sack of Baltimore,” and “Fontenoy.” Davis wrote to teach his countrymen their own history and to give the Young Ireland movement a voice. The selections show why his songs outlasted the party politics of the 1840s and passed into common memory.